Treason: U.S taxpayers funding Iran’s military expansion

If this isn’t treason, I don’t know what is. On Thursday, Eli Lake reported at Bloomberg that thanks to the Obama regime, U.S. taxpayers are now funding Iran’s military expansion. That’s right — Iran — the country whose leaders foment chants of “Death to America.”

According to Lake, the expenditures are “inadvertent”:

One of the unexpected results of President Barack Obama’s new opening to Iran is that U.S. taxpayers are now funding both sides of the Middle East’s arms race. The U.S. is deliberately subsidizing defense spending for allies like Egypt and Israel. Now the U.S. is inadvertently paying for some of Iran’s military expenditures as well.

It all starts with $1.7 billion the U.S. Treasury transferred to Iran’s Central Bank in January, during a delicate prisoner swap and the implementation of last summer’s nuclear deal to resolve a long-standing dispute about Iran’s arms purchases before the revolution of 1979.

For months it was unclear what Iran’s government would do with this money. But last month the mystery was solved when Iran’s Guardian Council approved the government’s 2017 budget that instructed Iran’s Central Bank to transfer the $1.7 billion to the military.

Lake said that Saeed Ghasseminejad, an associate fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, spotted the item and told him it was widely reported in Iran.

“Article 22 of the budget for 2017 says the Central Bank is required to give the money from the legal settlement of Iran’s pre- and post-revolutionary arms sales of up to $1.7 billion to the defense budget,” Ghasseminejad said.

Oppoents of the Iran deal on both sides of the political aisle warned this could happen, but it seems those warnings were ignored.

“The fact that U.S. taxpayers appear to be funding Iran’s military is outrageous,” GOP Rep. [score]Mike Pompeo[/score] told Lake.

But will anything be done? Hardly. These days, it seems treason doesn’t really mean anything anymore.

Lake added:

The irony here is that Iran has been pleading poverty in recent months. The country’s supreme leader and foreign minister have publicly complained that Iran’s economy has not seen the benefits expected from the Iran nuclear deal. And yet Iran’s 2017 $19 billion defense budget has increased by 90 percent from 2016, according to Ghasseminejad.

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